refraction #6

“running to pain” by kelsey lu has been in my rotation since i’ve heard it. it’s described a pattern and pain that i have felt and known for as long as i can remember. i’ve struggled with connecting with others — that because of all the failure i’ve perceived i’ve experienced with attempting to love others — that i am the reason that i have failed at maintaining connection; that i am fundamentally broken and unlovable. the pain of waiting and trying has gotten too heavy for me to carry and that if i shut everyone out before they can hurt me, then i have solved my fundamental, primordial human folly. i have wondered what i am holding out for. if the 10% of what i think happiness is is worth it; if disappearing would be better than to have a life sentence of isolation and disconnect because i am unable to be good enough, deserving enough to have anything else. to anticipate the breaking, the failure, the incompatibility, the worst case — the bracing and tension held in my bones as old as the earth itself. a feeling that pushed me into the world as i will go out: alone. i am doomed, destined to incessantly hold out for time for an existence marked by the beast to be loveless, because you cannot love the monster that exists in the mirror. that i am a martyr towards pain, instead of away from it — because it is all i have known, and it is all i have ever known to expect and deserve. the pain of loneliness — simultaneously pushing me between expanse and collapse, tightness and spaciousness — is my sanity because if i were to expect anything else, the universe would remind of its unfathomable entropy and pull the ground from under my feet. to be in pain, to be alone as the most human experience i could have. that it is a manifest destiny to decay and rot from the inside out. i came out of the womb running, because it was too late for me to go back and be someone else. that my evil and villainy and monstrousness was punishable by being banished, swallowed into the miasma of a black hole where light cannot enter. that my marginalization is the margins and fractions and broken glass that could only ever reflect back to me emptiness because light, color — was only reserved for those who grasp it. i have yet to believe that i can grasp light, so instead i must hug and sleep along the imprint of where a person should be, because what is fathomable and tangent is also impermanent. and at least there is a permanence in chaos.